Notes - Type 56: The Story of China's Army
Introduction
I love this guy. He's great, very glad he does the history stuff and not necessarily the firearms only part.
Viewing Order
This channel is huge, so if I want to take an analytical view on his content I should probably delineate a viewing order to take notes. His big "Recommended Viewing Order" is a great resource, but I should probably break it down into the other videos he does. PLA 101 is probably where I should start, even if it is on 2x view speed.
PLA 101 Series
China's Four (or So) Military Services
Soviets were clumpers, PLA were splitters, not necessarily the case anymore.
- Army (PLAGF) - Also known as the PLA Army, or PLA Ground Forces.
- Air Force (PLAAF) - Sky Army
- Navy (PLAN) - Sea Army
- Marine Corps (PLANMC)
- Rocket Forces (PLARF) - Rocket Army
- Peoples' Armed Police (PAP) -
- Aerospace Force - Not spoken about in this lecture
- Cyberspace Force - Not spoken about in this lecture
- Information Support Force - Not spoken about in this lecture
- Joint Logistics Support Force - Not spoken about in this lecture
- Depreciated - Anti Air Army
- Depreciated - Public Security Army (Frontier Protection Force {Soviet Border Guards}, and Internal Security Force {Soviet MVD Troops}) Now collapsed into the Peoples' Armed Police.
Army Forces
Arms were divided into 'gun', but then developed 'hand gun', 'artillery gun', and then 'infantry gun' for rifle. Divided into normal infantry, mountain troops, air assault troops, artillery, and anti-air soldiers (high shooting cannons, and ground-air guided bomb troops), engineeers, anti-chemical soldiers (NBC), flamethrower operator, recon, specops (not SF, but special purpose troops), railroad troops, aviation troops (all troops, not pilots), airborne.
- Aside on Acronyms: The chinese language does abbreviations by taking the first character from each word and jamming them together.
Navy
- Near Coastal Defence - Coastal Artillery
Air Force
Rocket Force
Created in 2016, originally known as the Second Artillery, which was the nuke forces. They have organic SF and recon, and the last cavalry units in the PLA, patrol Inner Mongolia on camels. Also the Dog Corps.
Other Notes
He's not super up to speed on modern PLA stuff, just as a matter of not reading about it. Lower confidence accordingly.